There are more kinds of music than the symphonies you can imagine. Trying
to stifle that music --- or bend it your personal sense of order ---
strikes me as the disservice.

Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting
things in order always means getting other people under your control.Denis Diderot; Supplement to Bougainville's "Voyage," 1796

it's an entropy thing. a node has title, author, date, content. content is the inviolatable nugget that must be inspected to be appreciated (or not). the title relates to the thread and may or may not have anything to do with the content. date doesn't do me much good, maybe others have more luck. that leaves the author which i believe is best used with a setting other than Anonymous.

you can go from the connected to the unconnected by ignoring the author, Anonymous reigns again. but it doesn't work the other way around, once Anonymous always anonymous.

Give me a break. That's ridiculous. You've apparently fallen into the trap of using a term you only partially understand to describe an unrelated process which you also only partially understand. Your implied analogy is broken anyway.

Disorder on this site is not increasing. And if it were, it wouldn't be due to the existence of Anonymous Monk. AM posts, I'd bet, maintain a pretty consistent percentage of all posts. (Though that percentage is likely to be much higher than normal in a thread such as this one where AM posting is being attacked directly.)

As I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, you can't eliminate anonymous posting. At least, you can't on an open site. As you aren't arguing that Perl Monks should start requiring a birth certificate and social security number (or equivalent for countries other than the U.S.) you aren't really suggesting that we do away with anonymous posting.

You just want to do away with the Anonymous Monk. You want every post to be tied to an account. But, if you think that would dampen the noise somehow, you are making all kinds of wrong assumptions. It would increase the noise.

Instead of posts by Anonymous Monk, which you can look at and know immediately are posted anonymously, we'd have posts by the likes of MonkAnonymous, jim_dandy, JohnQMonk, and snowhuoue. And you'd have to go check each of their homenodes before you realized that each only wrote one node and then vanished.

Worse, since a troll has to create a quickie troll account anyway, he might just decide to pick something more trollish like, for instance, zengargoy1e or zengragoyle, or zengarqoyle. Or all three.

That kind of stuff happens constantly on some other sites and message boards. It is minimal here. Almost absent. I wouldn't want to change that.

Finally, raising the "barrier to entry" (if you can abuse terms from physics, I can abuse terms from economics) will slow the growth of the community.
Scenario: someone happens upon this site, sees an interesting question that he might answer, finds that he can't without first creating account, and moves on to do something else forgetting about perlmonks entirely. Farfetched? Hardly. Had Anonymous Monk not existed, that would probably have described my first brush with PM. Instead, I answered the question and came back later. Soon thereafter, I created an account.

there is increased entropy in the second. you can loose informaion (or purposely remove it) but once it's gone it cannot be recovered without conscious application of energy (reading and organizing the anonymous articles, gluing back together humpty dumpty).

by posting anonymously instead of with a name (that ties articles written by the same consciousness (i really care not *who* you are)) you deny that bit of information and increase the entropy of perlmonks.

i'm not against anonymous for a visitor. if IPs could be tracked for a week or so and the visitor asked to then pick a name... good. if people who *ever* trash the Anonymous reputation for a good jab would do so to another user instead of our visiting guest Anonymous... good. if Anonymous can't post replies in threads... good. you don't sit in the doctors office and ask advice from the guy beside you. you don't go to church and confess your sins to the choir.

in fact, not allowing Anonymous to post replies can be seen as a good thing.

if nothing changes i'm fine with that. i've proposed many little (this bothers me) changes, none have come. can't complain, have neither the time not inclination to start hacking perlmonks code. i'm still here. if somebody would leave over a change let them go.

barriers to entry should not be feared. in 1900 i'm pretty sure you didn't have to take drivers-education, pass a test, give tons of info before you were allowed to drive.
you didn't have to pass tests before you were a doctor. when you called the police to report on your neighbor they didn't necessarily know who you were. in 1987 if you had an internet account and you were being a troll you would get a called into somebodys office and if it happened again you would be gone for a while. there were reprecussions for your actions. sadly that was lost when the barriers to entry didn't keep up with the increase in accesibility.

if Perl isn't important enough for you to remember or want to create an account on a site that's purpose is to discuss Perl then be gone with you. no loss.

Ada Lovelace for the palindrome
Albert Einstein for having smelly feet
Alfred Nobel for his contribution to battlefield science
Burkhard Heim for providing the missing link between science and mysticism
Claude Shannnon for riding a unicycle at night at MIT
Donald Knuth for being such a great organist
Edward Teller for being the template for Dr. Strangelove
Edwin Hubble for pretending to be a pipe-smoking English gentleman
Erwin Schrödinger for cruelty to cats
Hedy Lamarr for weaponizing pianos
Hugh Everett for immortality, especially for cats
Isaac Newton for his occult studies
Kikunae Ikeda for discovering the secrets of soy sauce
Larry Wall for his website
Louis Camille Maillard for discovering why steaks taste good
Marie Curie for the shiny stuff
Nikola Tesla for the cool cars
Paul Dirac for speaking one word per hour when socializing
Richard Feynman for his bongo skills
Robert Oppenheimer for his in-depth knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita
Rusi P Taleyarkhan for Cold Fusion
Sigmund Freud for his Ménage ā trois
Theodor W Adorno for his contribution to the reception of jazz
Wilhelm Röntgen for the foundations of body scanners
Yulii Borisovich Khariton for the Tsar Bomba
Other (please explain why)